Every person has a choice when he finds his way of living or something he has done does not conform to the truth of the gospel. He can repent and conform to the truth, or he can choose to persist in the wrong. The choice has consequences for eternity.
I once spoke with an erring Christian who had decided to be a homosexual. He once knew and believed the truth. Talking to him, I learned that he no longer believed anything close to the truth he once believed and confessed – a 180-degree turn. What had happened? Instead of changing and fixing his own desires, he had changed his beliefs to match his desires and behavior.
You ask – do people really change their beliefs to match their own desires and behavior that they are unwilling to change? They do. I do not deny that there are steps along that road. Perhaps it begins with making excuses for sin – for example, I had no choice, or what was I to do, or anyone in my situation would have done that. Maybe he tells himself that it is ok this time. Perhaps he is even so bold as to justify his sin before others. Eventually his conscience is seared, and he cuts his anchor to truth. And love of the truth has been cast off like yesterday’s garbage.
He does not suddenly say to himself, “I am searching high and low to change my belief so that my conscience will not condemn me about my behavior.” Rather, he is being carried away, driven by his own lusts. And when all is said and done, he has engaged himself in self-deception.
The point is illustrated in 2 Timothy 4:3-4: “For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers; and they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables.” Some men will search out and accumulate for themselves teachers that do not teach the truth so that they can hear something different. What’s behind it? “According to their own desires.” In essence, their own desires will drive them to find a teacher who will teach them what fits their desires. What will be the end? Their beliefs will change and will conform to their own unlawful desires. Of course what they now believe, in their self-deception, does not change truth, for truth is not subject to the lusts of men.
Do they not have the ability to identify their own desires and reject them and overcome them? They do, however engrained or difficult. But they have deceived their own heart. How tragic!
“The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked; who can know it?” (Jer. 17:9). The greatest of deceptions is self-deception. But there is an answer. The cure for a desperately wicked heart – a sick heart – is the healing provided by God, as seen a few verses later: “Heal me, O Lord, and I shall be healed; save me, and I shall be saved, for You are my praise” (vs.14). And Jesus is the great physician (Mark 2:17). But men must be willing to identify and crucify their own desires. The light of the gospel has the power to expose them and direct change.
Every man, whether outside Christ or in Christ, needs brutal honesty with himself; he needs to examine his own desires and get them in line with the truth of the gospel. – Larry Jones